On both sides of the Pyrenees, in an area that goes from Andorra to the Bay of Biscay, there are more than 1,400 megalithic monuments, cromlechs and menhirs.
Also called harrespil (circle of stones) in Basque, it is a unique set of cromlechs with no equivalent in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula and which, compared to those found in other parts of Europe, are smaller in size, although the questions they raise are just as interesting.
They began to be studied at the beginning of the 20th century and by 1917 J.M. de Barandiarán already cites more than 20 in his work on Basque prehistory. Some 1,445 are currently catalogued, most of them unexcavated (933 in the Spanish part and 512 in the French part). Those that have been studied date back to around 1200-600 BC, during the Iron Age.
A curious fact is that its distribution in the Aragonese and Navarrese Pyrenees is interrupted when it reaches the Leizarán River, since from its western margin only a few scattered specimens appear.
Thus, the archaeologist Xavier Peñalver believes that the Leizarán valley must have been the border that separated two different cultures in the Iron Age, that of the Vascones to the east and the Várdulos to the west. This opinion is supported by the archaeologist Mercedes Urteaga, indicating that this border delimited the limits of the Vascones and Celtiberians.
Its shape is similar to that of other European cromlechs, a circle of stones, sometimes surrounding a burial mound or a dolmen (such as Ponzotarri), with a diameter of between 2 and 21 meters (the most numerous are between 3 and 10 meters ), and whose menhirs do not generally exceed 3 meters. Those who keep more or less all the stones of the circle consist of between 8 and 50.
They usually appear in groups, registering sets of several circles of different diameters. The largest of all is Agiña with 27, followed by Errekaleku with 26 (both in Navarra) and Okabe (in France), with 26 cromlechs. The area where the greatest number of them have been documented is the Corona de los Muertos, in Huesca, where there are more than 100.
The largest cromlech of all is that of Azpegiko Lepoa in Navarra, which has a diameter of 21 meters, followed by that of Ibón de Tramacastilla in Huesca, with 18 meters.
In some of the excavated human remains have appeared in the form of ashes, so it is considered that they had a funerary meaning. However, the small amount of remains found does not allow us to identify its function as a burial itself, but only as the cenotaph in which part of the ashes of the deceased is symbolically deposited .
Ceramic fragments, flint rings and arrowheads, among other items, have also been recovered. For some authors, they would be the tombs, located at an average of 1,000 meters high, of shepherds who lived at somewhat lower levels of the Pyrenees.
Even so, other possible functions, such as astronomy, are not ruled out. In fact, in the Mendiluce cromlech (in the Sierra de Encia, Álava), one of the few located west of Leizarán, it was found that the largest menhirs, those located on the east-west axis, mark a orientation roughly coinciding with sunset at the summer solstice .
And some have wanted to propose an alternative theory, relating them to the Camino de Santiago (Way of the Stars) and a hypothetical primitive Pyrenean religion. This association, which is largely based on toponymy and the supposed similarities between the Basque language and Sumerian, seems quite unlikely.
Many of the Pyrenean cromlechs are cataloged in The Megalithic Portal, with information on their location and coordinates, maps, images and, in some cases, access conditions.
Recommended book
Dolmens, cromlech and menhirs:Basic guide to megalithism in Euskal Herria (Xabier Peñalver)